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| Pierre Coupey's After Rilke IV. |
The piece below is an edited excerpt from his catalogue essay.
If seeing is believing, then surely two vibrant
and dynamic works such as After Rilke III and After Rilke IV, intensify
belief, occurring as they do in the almost operatic
space where poetry becomes a palpable
presence. They are among the few works by Pierre
Coupey that have a literal or suggestive title,
serving as a signpost to their destination. It’s not
that they veer too closely to the programmatic,
or offer a concrete story for the viewer to “read,” if only because they reference one of the most
hermetic poets of the last century, but they do
offer a tantalizing piece of spiritual bait for those
of us who enjoy our mysteries served with a hint
of metaphor.
After all, Rilke is the keen-eyed observer who first
interpreted the aesthetic purpose and historical
importance of Cezanne when he remarked on
that great painter’s work that, “Surely all art is the
result of one’s having been in danger, of having
gone through an experience all the way to the
end, where no one can go any further.” And like
the poet they reference, these two works, along
with their companions, take us immediately to
the place where they were made: the very edge
of pictorial expression, where no one can go any
further, as if arriving at a coast where the land
itself disappears.
Although Coupey’s roots and sources derive
from Montreal, his point of origin, his major
work has been done in Vancouver and he
could be considered a West Coast artist. Upon
closer inspection, however, one sees that his
work eschews any dualism of east and west,
and moves from a “third coast” of the mind.
There is after all, no east or west in dreams,
and his paintings evoke the retinal charms of
a certain optical abandon associated with the
unconscious. Finally we can envisage a ticket
to that ultimate foreign country which Rosalind
Krauss identified as the optical unconscious, and
which another poet, Wallace Stevens, evoked so
magically in his poem “Of Mere Being,” in which
he called upon us to imagine “the palm at the
end of the mind beyond the last thought” and
to listen carefully to the creatures that dwell
there in that distance, singing in the palm a song
without human meaning, a foreign song. That is what these paintings are singing, a song without
words in a language of free-floating forms.
All, or most, of this gifted senior painter’s works
are untitled and identified numerically, and with
good reason: on the third coast of the mind, and
in the palm of the mind that makes such works,
language pales by comparison to the outright
clarity of declarative statements made by each
piece. As the artist himself puts it: “The majority
of the works in this show are titled Untitled and
numbered –– to put the stress on just the bare
facts of the paintings themselves: how they were
made, what forces went into their desire to be
clearly themselves. To relieve them of words, of
these words. To let them be paint.” Letting them
be paint is the essence of letting us see what we
are seeing, just that and only that.
Yet language still seductively tempts us to
approach the works, with its paltry ammunition
in hand, as a kind of talisman that refuses to help
us grind the images down into literal, or literary,
meaning. Instead they playfully unfold in that
Rilkean danger zone of extremity while we adjust
to their absolute flatness and utter absence
of illusion. If anything, they are all about the
meaning of meaning itself, not merely about one
meaning or another from the menu available to
the modernist canon. They are, perhaps, exactly
the drastic measures our drastic
times require.
